He’d liked Umbria. A quiet planet with red skies and a landscape of endless brown prairie with tufts of tall pale grasses and beautiful singing winds that caressed the skin and crooned in the ears. It would’ve been an even nicer world had it not been strewn from continent to continent with bloodied corpses and ruined cities, some there because of him and his battalion and some because of another enemy they’d fought on that turf—an enemy from a distant world they’d been ordered to exterminate for reasons the soldiers in his squad were never told.
But he was here now. And he didn’t care that his cellmate had interesting eyes or that he’d reacted with surprising quickness to Khim’s closed fist moving toward his face, or that he’d talked to Khim as if they could be friends.
This man was a Damico. Of course he’d denied it, saying his name was Varain. Khim did not know why that would be, but the guards had the truth. Computers didn’t lie. His cellmate was a Damico, and that name, on Gideon and in the cities that floated above it, meant one thing to Khim: they were the ones who’d witnessed him murder a man named Chin. The ones who owned the House of Xavier. They were the ones who owned him. That meant, technically, his cellmate owned him. And whether Trev claimed ignorance of that fact or not, Khim would never be prepared to be his friend.
He heard Trev move on the bed above, most likely to lie down. After that, Trev did not make another sound for a long time.
Khim was tired. He had not slept since yesterday, since his nap in the dungeon cage. He’d been drugged, raped, beaten, and arrested, had cursory medical aid, and then he’d come here. He was exhausted.
He glanced at the bed, then up at the ceiling. He would’ve preferred a way to dim that ceiling glow-light, but there was nothing to be done about that. He looked back at his pillow and the neatly turned-down bed, then pulled his legs onto the mattress and lay back, hands crossed over his stomach.
Above him, the underside of the bunk was a solid, dark metal, almost black. The pillowcase smelled faintly of bleach. He could hear the echoes of men’s voices from all around the plaza area and conferring in separate cells. Once in a while, a shout shot out over the vast space. Khim was used to noise like that from living on a starship in close confines with others of his kind; it didn’t bother him. He would soon learn to tune this place out as well.
But right then the sounds, the new scents, and the fact that a Damico was situated right above him greatly annoyed him.
His body ached in a kind of fierce way he’d never felt before, not even when he’d been injured on duty. Not even this last time, when he’d lost his hand permanently—and that still stabbed where it connected to his wrist—or when he’d been told he would be sold.
This ache came from deep within like a violation of spirit. Some might’ve laughed to learn he had that thought. But of course he had a spirit. All humans did.
He had new skin grafts that felt all right, but his ribs hurt. And when he had jumped angrily onto Trev’s bunk, a sharp pain had twisted in his gut. Pain from the rapes still radiating, making his teeth clench. His lungs heavy. His throat thick.
He’d never been raped before. And he had never raped anybody himself. He was programmed against that sort of behavior, as well as against uncommanded violence against humans. His threat to knock Trev out, not to mention the murder he had committed less than twelve hours ago, were highly disturbing. Something in his mind had changed abruptly, and he did not know how to deal with that.
Of course it had to do with the rape. He wasn’t made for that sort of treatment. Not mentally, not physically.
He had a dim memory of fumbling, first-time sex as a teenage boy with some nameless, faceless person whose gender he could not recall. The memory was faded and uncertain. It wasn’t even his. None of his scant memories before age twenty were his. Knowing that, he rarely allowed them to intervene or affect him.
Any androids in the training labs, right after being “born,” who rejected memory programming or all programming, were usually taken away. Destroyed—or so the rumors told. Or maybe they were somehow altered, fixed. That would make more sense. It took a lot of energy and time to grow a fully adult human. His kind were an expensive lot.
He had suffered a bit of that amnesia, but the scant memories his brain did supply had been enough to get him past all the training tests. He kept quiet about that “blank past” aspect of himself. He did not want to be “taken away.”
Khim stretched his legs out, flexing his thigh and calf muscles, the material of the drawstring trousers abrasive against his skin. An echo of his internal pain still radiated through him. He closed his eyes and saw again the dead man on the floor, the one they’d called Chin, with his head at a strange angle, his naked torso sprawled. Khim had seen dead bodies far too many times. He’d even killed a lot of them. But that was war. This was different, more personal, a feeling of wrongness about not being ordered to do it; it was more like revenge. Something he’d been conditioned against.
But at the time he’d broken the man’s neck, a strange release had come over him, as if a huge weight had lifted. Then reality flooded back and he was appalled. That killing was on no one’s order. He should not have been able or even willing to do it, no matter the reason. His indoctrination process had been firm and clear. He was never to operate as a soldier or an assassin on his own, not even in self-defense. He was supposed to sacrifice himself first, prepare to die, before harm came to another. Unless command orders were given, he was not really a killer. Just because he knew how did not mean he wanted to act on that knowledge.
In this moment, on this day, a sympathetic attorney and a soft judge were the only reasons he had lived. Apparently, being gang-raped, even if you were an android with no rights, still sickened some humans.
But now it was as if some dam inside him had cracked. He had killed once. On his own. Proof that he could. And he’d already threatened his cellmate. Was he finally breaking? Would he get worse?
If so, he could not count on always having sympathetic judges and lawyers.
If he was going to survive, he would have to control his impulses. That meant not getting to know people, not letting them in, not caring if they insulted him or even hurt him.
But just knowing a Damico family member shared his cell made his brain feel as if his careful barriers were breaking down all over again. He had wanted to hurt Trev. And if Khim could believe him, Trev didn’t even know why.
He needed to make an appointment with his advocate in the prison as soon as possible. He needed a different cellmate, both for Trev’s protection and preserving his own fragile sanity.
Absently he rubbed at the area of skin where his metal hand met flesh. His eyelids fluttered. His body felt strangely cold, probably due to lack of sleep and food.
Slowly he moved around until he was under the blanket. He turned onto his side, facing the wall, and huddled into himself, one hand between his thighs, the other—the metal one—tucked under his chin. Just before sleep he determined to himself that he would keep control, not allow himself to lash out again.
But along with that thought came the unbidden image of Chin, sprawled and broken in the House of Xavier. Khim had stood beside that corpse, damaged and trembling, his body released from torture for a moment of almost pure pleasure—to be able to just breathe, to not be touched anymore so that it hurt, to not be manhandled in intimate, degrading ways where strangers had no business.
A deep part of him was glad the man was dead.
Lying in his bunk, trying to block out the strange sounds and smells, he heard that other self in the blue space whisper in the back of his mind.
Never again. No matter what you have to do.
It was an instinct that blocked out all else.
Survive.
But the word was a contradiction. To survive he must not be violent. For violent androids were dead androids.
Right then, he feared for the men in this prison if they ever laid a hand on him. He feared he would lose his mind
once and for all.
The judge and attorney had been idiots. He should have been put down.
Breath trembling in his throat, body tightly clenched, Khim finally fell into the escape of darkness. And sleep.
KHIM’S SLEEP was iridescent. Liquid. He heard distant voices echoing as if through a long chamber, and his mind rocked in a warm zone, relaxed and safe.
He dreamed of the day he was born, new and fresh, with stirrings of brief memories that felt real, stretched like blue sky across his mind… like summers he had never experienced, like nights dripping with rain and stars where people thrived and laughed and cried and lived.
He remembered thrashing in a coffin of warm fluid, a taste of sourness, feeling that swirl of sloshing warmth all over his skin as rough hands pulled him up and he took his first gasping breath.
Khim knew many things about himself in that single moment. He was twenty years old. He knew four distinct languages and the words for twelve others. He had clear memories of schooling—reading, math, and science, and later as a teenager, major weapons training. He had a memory of a military boot camp at the age of nineteen. And yet he could not have really been there, because right now he was looking down at his body for the first time, sitting in a pool of fizzy blue liquid, the first shush of oxygen being pushed into his lungs through his mouth and throat—the act of breathing.
A man in a shiny blue jumpsuit that looked waterproof said, “Who are you?”
His mind supplied the answer. “Khim 18367.” His voice came out scratchy. He coughed twice.
The man looked at a digital paperboard. “Schooling?”
“Watersign High School. One year at Colcar College with a half degree in xenomechanics. Karfax boot camp training, four months.”
Water sloshed as he found his hands and brought them up to his face, looking at them.
“Good. That checks. Parents?”
“Mary and John. Died when I was five. Raised by my Uncle Joe.”
Then Khim felt the new skin of his brow furrow. He tried to remember their faces and couldn’t. “Uncle Joe” was a name only. But the man with the paperboard didn’t ask him to describe the people he named.
Khim struggled to remember them. Nothing.
“Good,” the man said.
“Who are you?” Khim asked, trying to shake off the discomfort of his incomplete memory. He had an urge to stand, but as he moved his legs under the water, they quivered, and he did not feel confident in his strength yet.
The man’s mouth curved up. “Aric. But that doesn’t matter. You’ll be leaving here shortly. You are a soldier now, enlisted to fight on the battle cruiser Doom in Shadow.”
“I know what a soldier is and that I am trained to do that job,” Khim replied. “Thank you for telling me.”
Aric looked at him strangely when Khim said “thank you.” He glanced at the digital reader. “Guess you were raised to be polite.”
“I don’t know. I guess I was.” He remembered only snapshots of any personal upbringing. His mind tried to summon more.
A boy running down a beach yelling at birds called seagulls. Lying in a field of sweet-scented grass, staring up at the stars with a strange longing in the pit of his stomach. A voice from a shadowed room saying, “It’s an honor to enlist, to fight the good fight. You will be a hero.”
The word hero made his heart fill and tremble. The memory was trying to convince him he chose to be a soldier. It was an obvious lie.
“You will be feeling your strength come up to normal levels in about a minute. Then we’ll get you out of that tub,” Aric said.
“My body seems to be shivering,” Khim said. “Is that normal?”
“Perfectly normal as your muscles and nerves settle in. You aren’t cold, are you?”
“No.”
He tried to figure out why he was shivering. He knew that something was strange; his memories were distant, of another time and place, another boy. They were grounding moments, but they only made him feel divided. Was this normal? When he had been asked, “Who are you?” he had immediately answered a name and number. But who was he aside from a label? Not the boy on the beach—that did not resonate. Why he knew this so quickly, he wasn’t sure, but he understood intuitively he had no family, no friends, nothing but a job. His skin was so shiny and new, his body stretching out for the very first time.
His mind answered his question before he could ask it.
Who are you?
He was someone who had not lived before this very moment.
At that thought, the shivers overtook his breathing, his vision blurred, and the warm liquid surged against him as he tried to curl inward.
He closed his eyes tightly, saw a dark spiral in his mind. It spun, drawing him down and into it.
Aric’s voice seemed to echo. “Khim, can you hear me? Can you hear me?”
He did not answer. He thought he might be choking, because his throat seized as he sputtered and coughed.
He heard Aric speaking in a low tone. “Need assistance, sector five, vat 18367.”
Khim heard footsteps in sets of three pounding on a metal floor.
Aric’s voice. “Get him out of there now.”
Hands came under his arms and pulled. More hands wrapped around his wrists and tugged. Fingers grasped at his ankles. He was lifted through the warmth, and the air hit his entire body. He heard the liquid lap the sides of the tub, sluicing from his skin. Smelled rain. The hands that held him set him gently onto a soft platform.
He was coughing, his limbs stretching out, grasping, flailing. A sound came up from his throat, a strange, welling cry. A salty taste ran over his lips.
Aric. “Can you save him?”
Something poked at his mouth. Fingers lifted the lids of his eyes, and the soft greenish light of the room entered. A cold hardness touched his chest.
Another voice. “Heart rate and pulse normal. He’s breathing on his own. There’s no event.”
But Khim continued to choke.
Aric said, “But he’s struggling to breathe.”
“He’s crying.”
“I’ve never had one do that before.”
“It happens. They want their mommies sometimes.”
Laughter.
“Hey. He can still hear you. Besides, this one’s parents died when he was five.”
“It’ll pass. There’s a shock to the system. Some are born laughing. Are you new here?”
Aric’s voice. “Been here a week.”
“You’ll experience it all. Get him dried and standing and get the protein drink into him. Then get him on the running wheel. Nothing like physical exertion to remind the mind what it’s here for. Survival. And this one here is a soldier, so for him it will be all about the fighting.”
Footsteps receded.
Eyes still shut tight, Khim heard every word. He understood it all in a flash.
I’m not the boy who lay back in a field gazing at tangles of stars. I’m a soldier made to assess the situation and survive. I have not lived until today. I am a designer-model “android”—Khim 18367—and I do what I am told.
No one had called him that word—android, the derogatory but popular term for his kind—but his mind supplied it from somewhere in his downloaded education.
The realization left him listless. Alone. A feeling like hollowness that started in the stomach and fed to all the regions of his body, settling finally in his brain.
His sobbing began to recede as he felt something soft moving all over his body. A towel, drying him. Slowly it moved to his face, blotting his damp-streaked cheeks, running over his hair.
Khim took a breath, opened his eyes. Aric stood over him, blue eyes looking down at him from a pale round face. “I’m sorry they laughed. I don’t believe in being mean, even to an android.”
Khim’s stomach muscles contracted as he sat up with ease. He was getting stronger by the second. He looked around at the room where he saw the vat he’d come out of, a black tub like a tube attache
d to various pipes and machines with screens that flashed white numbers and lines. The green-gold light came from high up.
He lifted his gaze. Tubes of light made crosshatched patterns on a dark ceiling. The area he was in was huge, filled with vats much like his own, all closed for the moment. A corridor stretched in front of him as far as he could see, and as he looked about, he saw the place was comprised of hundreds and hundreds of those vats. The air came into him now, softer, dry. He swallowed tears, blinked.
“Will I train more here?” Khim asked when he could finally speak.
“You’ll have some indoctrination classes.”
“With others like me?”
“Yes. Other android soldiers. You understand quickly. It’s all there in your brain, but most take an hour or more to assimilate what they are and why they’re here.”
Aric brushed the cloth over his shoulders. He was gentle. Khim heard a soft tone to his voice. He liked it.
Aric said, “You’re more sensitive than the others I’ve birthed.”
“Am I?”
“I wouldn’t have pegged you a soldier.”
“What, then?”
“The pretty ones, they—” Aric stopped. “Never mind.”
“Sensitive. That’s a bad thing.”
“You’ll have classes about how to build the walls in your mind to toughen you, harden you.”
“Why?”
“Less emotion, less suffering.”
“That’s a good thing?”
“Yes.”
Khim processed that. He understood all too quickly, all too well. He was nothing more than a tool, to survive as best he could without undue torment. Aric was right to tell him not to feel. He’d do best to clamp down on emotion, be tight and efficient with his thinking, and use his mind to survive only. Nothing more. It should begin now. Why wait? The weeping was painful and uncomfortable. He did not want to repeat that scene.
The Android and the Thief Page 8